In Anodyne, you explore and fight your way through surreal and at times, creepy, nature, urban and abstract themed areas in the human Young's subconscious, evoked by a 16-bit-era visual style and a moody, dream-like soundtrack. created by http://www.twitter.com/seagaia2 and http://www.twitter.com/jonathankittaka .

Reviews

"Simultaneously, the game creates a sensation of lost, but not abandonment. In this, you are in a mysterious world, unfamiliar and bizarre, yet the eerily nostalgic design instills the necessary knowledge to proceed in your adventure."
The Ambivalest

"Sean Hogan and Jonathan Kittaka have made magic with this game, creating a world that I could be afraid to enter but never want to leave...The locations are vibrant and detailed, going to all manner of different places...[the music] can take the visual mood and shift it into territory that pixel art shouldn't be able to inhabit...I know we're only in February, but this has Game of the Year written all over it."
Mash Those Buttons - 4.7/5

"Anodyne can be as funny and charming as Link’s Awakening on occasion, but the overall tone is one of unease, with a subtle malevolence – the ‘something seems a bit off here’ factor – reminiscent of the indie horror Lone Survivor. Meaning is elusive, but themes and motifs soon begin to take form, in a game that feels increasingly personal the more you burrow into it."
PC Gamer - 84/100

They are working on Even The Ocean http://www.twitter.com/eventheocean , a new adventure platforming / hybrid walk-&-press slice-of-life adventure/daydream platforming game. It will also be released on Steam.

I haven't finished the game yet but so far I really I like it, it is reminding my a lot of the Zelda's, which in my opinion is a good thing and I do not belive that they are copying Nintendo at all however it is pretty similar to Zelda. Defintly a real good game and very fun.

Anodyne feels like an homage to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, but everything is just very... strange. Just like the classic Zelda game, it's played from a top-down perspective and many of the enemies are even based on similar enemies from the Zelda series. Some of the dialog is even a direct reference to Link's Awakening.

Young, the character you play as, wields a trusty broom instead of a sword. Sometimes the broom must be used to push around piles of dust in order to solve simple puzzles. These puzzles never feel to be the main focus, though, and there's an unexpected amount of jumping obstacles in many of the dungeons. You discover a few add-ons for your broom throughout the game, but that's the limit of the items you can use.

You travel through varied environments and have many odd encounters. Throughout the game, the mood shifts between being slightly "off" to very wrong. It's hard to explain, but here's an example: in one dungeon, there are inexplicably a bunch of identical-looking men that just wander the screen. You can't speak to them or attack them, but they stop your movement and you can push them out of the way. Whenever these men are on screen, there is a creepy sound effect. At another point in the game, you walk down a dock to a fisherman. When you press the button to try to talk to him, Young instead pushes him into the lake and he drowns in a bloody whirlpool. Even later, you must kill a bunch of townspeople so a guy will let you into his house. It's some very odd stuff, and much of it is accompanied by a somewhat creepy atmospheric soundtrack without much of a melody.

As a big fan of classic 2D Zelda games, I was excited to try out Anodyne. It's definitely a unique experience. Gameplay-wise, it never feels as well-polished as your typical Zelda game, but I did enjoy my time with it for the most part. There were a few times when I got lost and had to consult some maps online, though. At the very end of the game, I found that I had to get 36 of the hidden "cards" to progress. Fortunately I had gotten most of them while playing through, but it could have been particularly frustrating if I hadn't been collecting them throughout my game.

The word "anodyne" in a literary sense can mean "soothing" or "blandly agreeable," and I can certainly give the game the bland part.

For the better part of three hours playing the game I did not know if I could stomach finishing it. I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's a Legend of Zelda-like with a ton of strange thematic choices, poor writing, too much dialogue and tonal shifts that will give a player whiplash. What few inventive game mechanics it employs are spread throughout an atrociously long and dull climb to nowhere. You might pass through seven screens just to get to the next place: no enemies, no obstacles to speak of, just a march. As if the designers (credited indie devs Sean Hogan Jonathan Kittaka) couldn't be bothered, having come up with the overall map of an area, to fill it in with things. This becomes very apparent when retracing your steps. You will find a checkpoint at the beginning of an area, putting you on guard for the trials ahead. Then those trials never manifest and seven screens later there's another checkpoint.

To what end? Was my adversary through that place boredom? Will checkpoints at the beginning and end of a stretch really help me combat that adversary?

The few basic enemies you encounter are all laughably simplistic. Many pose no threat at all. Some cannot even harm you. This led me to think perhaps they were more of a rhetorical device than a game object, really. The only rhetorical question that sprang to mind was "why am I still playing this?" Then later I encountered fire-breathing lions and they shot my dandy theory to hell.

But I do know the answer to that rhetorical question, as the game is a little more than a poorly-written, bland, easy Zelda clone.

First, even though the various mechanics are spread out way too far, the few that the game offers are very neat. Even with all the crummy verbosity, the game does not tutorialize, rather giving you the tools and letting you figure things out. A good bit of design. The nugget of a good game. I would never have thought that piles of dust could have so many uses, but there you go.

Second, there is at least one boss in the game that requires a neat bit of fooling and approaches a reasonable challenge. Shame that I can only honestly say that about one of perhaps eight or so bosses, but that one is very good and fun.

Third, there are a few counter-intuitive design choices that I won't spoil that I do admire as choices. It is this last point that keeps my thumb pointing up with all I've said about the game to this point. What I will say is that it's a shame you only get the full, mechanically complete game after playing through the whole thing.

Heck I guess that's a second way it reminds me of Fez. The first was the music and sound effects. Which I didn't mention. Okay.

The music is fine if you're into chiptunes and oscilloscopes. Tones, mostly sine waves. Some triangle. There are several good tones.

Which is more than I can say about the jokes. Those are all tonedeaf. And just grating given everything else that happens. I want to say that, as a rule, you don't get to make crappy puns about bicycles with names in the same game where you murder a man and jump into his corpse-portal to go commit an abortion on a tentacle monster. Which is part of what I mean when I say the game is tonally all over the place. Anything vaguely interesting as a narrative point just gets dropped somewhere; crushed away by screen after screen of nothing happening.